Posts Tagged ‘Maddie’s Thoughts’

May 2012

Reclaiming Wife: The Weight of the World

Body image posts are hard. They’re hard for people to read and hard for people to discuss, even on APW. This makes me sad. It makes me sad because I feel like Western Women have been fed a poison pill about our bodies, and instead of valuing them for what amazing tools they are, we spend our lives beating our bodies up, and then trying to come to some sort of reluctant truce with them. This leaves us unable to converse with other women in supportive ways, because different perspectives might harm our tentative peace we’ve struck with ourselves. But. What APW Editor Maddie had to say about putting on fifty pounds after getting married, grappling with that emotionally, and still loving the shit out of herself, was so important that we had to publish it. So please don’t read Maddie’s experience as filling in for your own. Instead, let it stand as one super smart woman’s experience, and let it guide a conversation about your own thoughts. (Fingers crossed!)
A few weeks ago, a tweet came through my Twitter feed that went something like this:

I’ve gained ten pounds since my wedding. I feel like such a failure.

No stranger to the post-wedding weight gain myself, it was the last part that stopped me cold. Failure. At first I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. FAILURE?! Really?! How are we allowing a society to exist in which a ten-pound weight gain amounts to failure? I wanted to reach through the computer and shake the person on the other end and say, “You aren’t failing! The world is failing you!”

But then I was mostly sad. Because I remember that feeling. It happened to me when I looked in the mirror, not more than two years after my own wedding; I noticed the stretch marks that had settled on my body after a particularly grueling start to married life left me with fifty pounds of excess body mass and a chubbiness that had begun to show in my face.

For me, the change wasn’t gradual. I instantly gained back the twenty pounds I’d lost before the wedding when I decided to throw away our pots and pans mid-move in anticipation of getting a new set as a registry gift. Well, the wedding came and went. And the move came and went. And we didn’t get our pots and pans. So after we got married, we ate frozen pizza for three months until we could afford a new set and in the meantime basked in the glow of being newlyweds in a shiny new apartment with a newfound freedom and DVR’d episodes of Glee to catch up on.

Then we got our dog. Saddled with sleepless nights and too much overtime, our routine—which was once made up of bonding over home-cooked dinners—quickly turned to running down the street for—ready for it—fresh pizza and scarfing it down before one of us passed out on the couch from sheer exhaustion. My Christmas present that year was our one-year-later honeymoon to Mexico and an extra thirty pounds of midsection. Gee, thanks, you shouldn’t have.

But it doesn’t matter how I gained the weight or even how much I gained. What matters is how I felt afterwards. I’d lost and gained weight before, mostly the same twenty pounds in college, usually because I couldn’t keep my hands away from the cafeteria cookies and because I didn’t understand that one cookie is a serving, not seven (which is bullshit, if you ask me). But this time it was different. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: The Weight of the World

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 405 Comments »

May 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Jumping In the Deep End

The thing that I’ve loved about the posts on moving this week is that they weren’t really just about moving. They were about defining marriage for ourselves, about dealing with the massive uncertainties life throws at us, and about embracing change. Today, APW Associate Editor Maddie talks about how moving in together was hard. Not because they had relationship problems, but because she was scared of what marriage meant. Her post cut through layers of bullshit for me, made me think clearer (and secretly made me love her mom).

When I was fifteen, my mom came home and announced that she’d found me a job. She and my father had decided that it was time for me to learn adult responsibility (also I was beginning to cost my family the kind of money that only a high school girl can spend) so my mother had done the hard part and had gone and found a job for me. She was so pleased that she’d found a position so close to home that would cater to my class schedule that she nearly missed the part of the conversation where I’d started crying.

Bawling over the countertop, I explained that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to work. (Which was my mom’s first and most terrifying fear. Had she raised a loafer?) I just (sob) wasn’t (sob) ready. Getting a job felt like such a big step, and the decision was being made for me. I hadn’t had time to consider what it meant, to weigh the consequences against the rewards, and thus I was convinced that this very big step was going to change everything about life as I knew it. My mother, of course, told me to stop being irrational and to go clean my room. So I cried, then I cried some more, and then when I’d officially exhausted my body’s salt resources, I got my sh*t together and went to work. And it turns out that working was just fine. Less fun than loafing around and doing nothing, but more rewarding in that I now had cash to burn and was contributing to society (or something like that).

To my surprise, it turns out that moving in with Michael was much like getting that first job. I had originally expected the decision to be one that I would arrive at when I was in my mid-twenties, once Michael and I had both had time to explore our early twenties on our own, and after years of “finding ourselves” we would simultaneously arrive at the conclusion that life was better spent together than apart.

Instead, I found myself at 21 years old, about to graduate, with no job prospects in sight, looking very seriously at the possibility of moving back home. With nowhere to go, the only other option was to take the plunge and move in with Michael. And while it was the obvious choice (moving to Maine wasn’t really a viable option), the decision plagued me with the same anxiety as the moment my mother told me I was going to enter the workforce. Michael and I had gotten engaged the previous winter, and while I had gladly accepted his proposal, I had also originally thought of our engagement as something like layaway. (We could decide we wanted this now, and then purchase it for real in 5-6 years, right?) Suddenly, a few months later, I was staring down the prospect of being engaged to be married. Which, it turns out, felt like an entirely different beast altogether.

I was scared sh*tless. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Jumping In the Deep End

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 33 Comments »

Apr 2012

Maddie On Failing Up

When we decided to create “Change of Plans” week, both Maddie and I jumped on it and offered to write posts on our own lives. So we wrote them, read each others posts, and it turned out they were interesting echoes of each other. I was writing about what happens after a major (and outwardly perceived) success, and Maddie was writing about how you find real success in the first place. (Hint: It’s not the way you were told that you find it.) Though in a sense, Maddie’s whole story is about what happens after early perceived success because of her Success Kid phase (which we must bribe her to tell us about, because it’s THAT GOOD). I hope this post sparks thoughts and discussion about making our way to life that feels successful to us (along with a healthy fear of geese).

The other day I was about to leave my house to take the dog for an appointment at the vet when I was stopped, physically, in my tracks. By a goose. An angry goose at that, and one that had a bone to pick with me.

I stood there frozen for a moment, and in between panicked thoughts of “Is this creature going to give me rabies?” and “Oh f*ck, oh f*ck, oh f*ck,” I thought to myself, “How the hell did I get here?”

Maybe it’s because I actually watched a few episodes of The Simple Life, but it felt a little like I was seeing the scene from afar. There I was, a caricature of my former city-slicker self, trying unsuccessfully to coax my 175lb dog (who has poor coordination and low-self esteem) into my hatchback while a wild goose was swinging its neck violently from side-to-side in an attempt to scare me away from his mate.

Someone call the TV crews. I think we have a hit on our hands.

But in reality, the reason that this moment made me do a double take was because it was the first time since moving to California that I felt like I’d surrendered to the change. I wasn’t shocked that this demonic animal was chasing after me. I was resigned and annoyed. And I’m pretty sure being resigned and annoyed with your surroundings is how you know you’ve settled into a place.

And it’s this level of comfort and ease that’s throwing me for a loop.

You see, before moving to California, I’d spent a few years fitting my square peg of a self into all of the round holes around me. I’ve written a little about my time working in the entertainment industry and how it tore out my soul little by little. But the reality is that there are plenty of people who love that life, and I just wasn’t one of them. So the trouble was never really with the system itself. (Editors note: HAHAHA, Maddie is being kind.) I mean, the system is flawed, yes, and anyone who works in a “dream industry” knows that, but more that I was trying so hard to force myself into what I thought I wanted to be that I was losing myself in the process.

It was an extremely painful process quitting my job in the entertainment business because for the first time in my life, I had to admit that I didn’t really know what I wanted at all (and as a former Success Kid, admitting you don’t know what you want is only slightly more jarring than actually failing at something you do want). What was worse was that I’d spent so much energy trying to become the picture of success that I no longer even remotely resembled myself.

So in an act of rebellion (and maybe as a coping mechanism for feeling like a failure), I decided that whatever I did next, I’d do it like the honey badger. I simply would not give a shit. And I would own it. Continue reading Maddie On Failing Up

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 138 Comments »

Mar 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Taming the Fear

The funny thing about this post from APW Associate Editor Maddie is it’s not the post she set out to write. She told me she wanted to write something lighthearted and funny about wedding planning. Turns out, she wrote about marriage and death (oops). But what she wrote nails everything. It banged me over the head with a new perspective of what getting married and creating a family is and why it really can matter. It single handedly answers the question, “Why even bother getting married?” Let’s discuss.

Earlier this week, as I was preparing to write my post for today, I kept burning through draft after draft, amassing a small digital pile of crumpled papers in my computer’s trash bin. Nothing was sticking. Nothing felt right.

But then I read Sara’s post, and on that same day stumbled on a video for a grieving center that my mother and sister had participated in back home, and it was like the universe was telling me to get over my desire to write about wedding dresses already and just write the damn thing it wants me to write.

What Sara, my sister, and my mom reminded me about was just how f*cking scary marriage really is. I know that popular wedding and marriage conversations would have us believe that the worst thing that can happen to our marriages is that they end in divorce (always spoken about in the abstract, too—Divorce, like it’s the same for everyone) and if I didn’t have the morbid mind of a kid who attended one too many funerals in her youth, I’d believe that was true. But for me, the reality of marriage is that it represents the constant risk of loving someone with all your heart while knowing full well that the universe might break it. To me, that is the scariest of scaries. And it terrifies me on a daily basis.

When my sister Stephanie passed away almost thirteen years ago, my family fell into disarray. My younger sister feared that she’d contract the same illness that had taken Stephie’s life; my mom was doing everything she could to keep our family together while coping with her own immense grief; and I shut myself off from the event entirely.

My grief manifested itself in the form of perfectionism and control. Amid the chaos of my family’s coping mechanisms, I saw the ability to manipulate the tangible artifacts of the world around me as a means of mitigating the tornado of feelings present in my house, while simultaneous providing me with the false sense of empowerment that I could prevent further tragedies from befalling us. I was a perky, overachieving robot who had cut herself off from reality, and as a result, from feeling anything at all. Which to me, was all the better. No feelings meant that you couldn’t feel anything bad. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Taming the Fear

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 130 Comments »

Mar 2012

Married, With Roommates

When APW Associate Editor Maddie (girlfriend just got a promotion, cheers!) first told me she wanted to write about being married and having a roommate, I paused for a moment, and then said, “Of course you have a roommate! You’re 25! I had roommates at 25. David and I didn’t even live together at 25.” By which I really meant, knowing Maddie, I was glad she wasn’t missing out on the fun (and terror) of group living that can come in your 20s just because she was married. And, while most of us aren’t married with a roommate-who-we-love-like-family, I think it’s important for us to each think about the parts of our life that our culture says we have to give up when we get married and figure out if that’s really true. Maddie points out that she needs a community around her, particularly as a married woman. And all the studies show just that: the more attached we are to a greater community outside our married bond, the better our marriages do. So that stuff culture says we have to give up when we marry: slumber parties, nights out dancing, ladies’ nights, poker nights, roommates? Might actually turn out to be key to our survival as a couple. And now, Maddie:

On Valentine’s Day, Michael and I went out to dinner at one of our usual places. The waitress walked us to our table and seated us—then handed us three menus. I looked left and then right at the two men sitting next to me, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I enjoyed a Valentine’s Day date with my husband. And our roommate.

That’s right. I’m married and I have a roommate. By choice.

The original decision to live with a roommate was not planned. While living on the East Coast, a friend of ours was offered a job in California, and his roommate (another friend) was going to be stuck with the unfortunate task of finding a one-bedroom apartment on short notice in an overpriced town. We had an extra bedroom at our place and figured that the additional income we’d get from his rent each month couldn’t hurt, so we agreed to let him stay until with us until he found a new place.

I was hesitant at first because my last roommate experience had been during college and involved a suite of eleven females, which needless to say left me feeling gun shy about sharing a space with someone other than Michael. Not to mention, a roommate completely eliminates the freedom of being able to walk around your apartment naked, a privilege I felt I’d earned.

But then, much to my own surprise, the arrangement stuck.

Though really, it shouldn’t have surprised me at all. Because up until that point, marriage had started to get lonely. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love living with Michael and am so grateful for the life we have been building together. But until we got married, we were both firm believers that your partner shouldn’t be expected to be everything all the time. And yet, marriage had somehow found us living in a state that was absent of any sort of extended community or nearby friends, and it was creating a huge void in our lives in the shape of The People You Spend Time With Who Aren’t Your Partner.

And unconventional as it might be, our roommate filled that void.

So when we were offered the opportunity to move to California, a place where once again we would be without a built-in network of friends or family, I was struck by the fear that we would revert back to the lonesome cohabitation that had previously defined our lives. So I called up our best friend Joe, who was living at his mother’s house in Maine at the time, and asked if he’d come with us. Without a job prospect out West, or even any savings, we knew that moving wouldn’t be ideal for him. But we also knew that he needed the change of scenery as much as we needed him to come with us. So we told him that if he could get enough money to pay for gas to get from Maine to California, we’d take care of the rest. And that’s what we did. Rather, it’s what we’re doing. Continue reading Married, With Roommates

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Reclaiming Wife | 75 Comments »

Mar 2012

Maddie and the Year of Wading Through Sh*t

When I introduced this week’s theme of finding your way through the hard parts to some measure of freedom, I mentioned that the APW staff was a pretty resilient bunch, having gone through a lot of really hard things in the past few years. APW Editor Maddie told me afterwards, “I’m a narcissist, so I totally thought you were talking about Me Me Me.” And so today, she’s here to tell you about how she survived a (totally literal) sh*t storm in the first year of her marriage and emerged on the other side. Happier, healthier, and with an enormous dog with a now-functional digestive tract.

Despite getting married very young, I never want anyone to think that I’m someone who acts rashly. On the contrary, sometimes I’m so painstakingly careful about making big decisions that I can be frustrating to be around. I think about my options, talk through the decision with friends, make risk/reward tables in my mind, and then when all that’s done, I brood about things for all of eternity. Finally, once I find myself spending literally every second of every day thinking about the thing I’m about to do, I act.

In the technical sense, I guess you could say I’m risk averse. But only for big things with real consequences. I wear sunscreen and don’t usually do more than five or ten miles over the speed limit, but I’m also not afraid of rejection, embarrassment, or karaoke.

Luckily, I married someone who operates this way too. I guess it’s a result of having fallen in love during an extremely tumultuous time in our respective lives. When Michael and I met, I was still dealing with the way my sister’s death was affecting my family, which at the time included my parents’ divorce. Meanwhile, Michael was in college watching from afar while his father struggled with mental health issues and while his own parents were also divorcing.

All this is to say, Michael and I take our time and make well-informed decisions. And we do it to keep our walls from ever falling down around us. We’ve seen what can happen when they do and know the dark place that relationships can go when faced with the unexpected. But don’t be confused. We’re not naive. We know we can’t prepare for everything. We just want to feel like we’ve done what we can to steel ourselves against life’s variables. The big stuff. You know, The Hard Stuff (TM).

Which is how, six months after getting married, Michael and I found ourselves driving the five hours north to Syracuse to adopt a dog. Once again, we felt we’d prepared ourselves appropriately. We had planned and researched for nearly three years before finally settling on the right breed for our lifestyle, making sure we had enough free time in our lives to devote to walks and playtime, and even waiting to get her until after the wedding so that we could give her the most stable home possible.

Which brings me here. To tell you how it all fell apart.

What we hadn’t planned for was that our dog might have crippling health issues. Now this can be devastating on its own, but our dog is also person sized. And this person-sized dog had health issues of the digestive order, which meant that for nine months (which was how long it took to find the magical cocktail of antibiotics to cure her) she couldn’t hold her bowels for more than two hours. Which, in case you’re wondering, sucks.

At first we were hopeful. We figured it was a bug or stress or something else short term and so we shifted a few things around in our schedule to make sure we could accommodate her needs. I’d get up in the middle of the night if Michael stayed up late and took her out before bed. Since I worked an hour and a half away from home, Michael would come home in the middle of the day to let her out on his lunch break. It wasn’t perfect and we were definitely feeling taxed, but it was a band-aid we’d put on a wound that would heal itself in time.

Until it didn’t.

Somewhere around month five, we broke. Our band-aid fell off and the wound was raw underneath. We were now pouring all of the energy that existed outside of work and bills and sleep into the dog and had become shadows of ourselves. We didn’t sleep more than four hours at a time, we ate takeout every night, and fought constantly. We had no energy for sex, which I took as the sign that our marriage was doomed, and so I engaged in pointless fighting about the fact that we weren’t having sex, which just repeated the stupid cycle.

Needless to say. We. Were. Not. Prepared. And what made matters worse (to my risk-averse self) was that all I could see was how this situation could play out in the future. Sleep deprivation has a way of making worst-case scenarios seem inevitable, so I became convinced that the situation would be hopeless if we ever came up against something like this again. I mean, what if one of our parents became seriously ill? If we couldn’t even pull ourselves together to take care of a dog, how could we ever sustain a marriage with a seriously ill family member? Because of what my parents went through when my sister passed away, I had no hope that we’d ever survive a sick child. Wasn’t our dog trouble just a foreshadowing of our future failure to withstand hardship?

Well, yes. But only if we let it. Continue reading Maddie and the Year of Wading Through Sh*t

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 68 Comments »